Best Freelance Job Boards To Find Committed Workers—Any Niche and Price Point

Hiring freelancers is often more cost-effective than keeping in-house employees or outsourcing workers, but the decision comes with many challenges. With over 1.2 billion freelance workers worldwide, the biggest headache for hirers is singling out the right person from a massive pool of applicants.

We’ll analyze the best freelance job boards from a hirer’s perspective. You’ll find:

• Honest reviews of the top general job boards for freelancers
• Overall evaluation of freelance job boards focusing on niches
• Expert tips for assessing freelancers quickly (before hiring)
• The best industry solution for hiring the top 1% of applicants

What’s Better—Freelance Job Boards or Marketplaces?

Most hirers have tried popular freelance marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr, and bidding candidates with extensive, self-curated portfolios gets tiring to evaluate. Freelance job boards prevent that analysis paralysis to an extent as they don’t entail the chaos of bidding wars. You also don’t have to pay a percentage of your transactions as a commission.

Keep in mind that most freelance job boards aren’t exclusively marketed as such, with many being referred to as remote or digital job boards.

What Are the Best Freelancer Job Boards?

There are numerous online job boards for freelancers attracting professionals from almost every industry. After thorough testing, we found the following 9 platforms to offer the best value for money in terms of finding reliable, high-quality freelancers in any field and on different budgets:

#1 FlexJobs

FlexJobs has been around since 2007 and has become quite the leader among job boards for freelancers, remote part-time workers, and similar positions. Use the well-reviewed platform to hire talent from over 60 categories, including:

• Graphic and web design
• Creative arts
• Sales and marketing
• Finance and accounting
• Legal services
• Writing and translation
• IT and software development
• Engineering

FlexJobs offers unlimited posting at a flat rate—the plans are:

1. $399 monthly
2. $859 quarterly
3. $2,999 annually

All plans provide resume sorting and applicant tracking system (ATS) integration options. You can book a demo of their services, but keep in mind that all plans get automatically renewed once subscribed.

#2 Working Nomads

Working Nomads has around 120,000 diverse monthly visitors from all sectors, which is why many growing businesses prefer listing their contractual vacancies on this website. The listings are also promoted via email alerts and social media. Working Nomads has three recruitment plans:

1. $149 for 1 job
2. $387 for 3 jobs
3. $545 for 5 jobs

All ads are visible for 30 days, and there are no add-on features that support hiring decisions with any plan. You can relist an expired job at half the price.

Working Nomads has a neat user interface, but the job search feature can be improved. Currently, candidates can only filter jobs by industry. Since each industry has hundreds of listings at any given time, your post can easily miss the attention of a suitable candidate.

#3 Freelanced

Freelanced is a free job board with over 100,000 workers available in more than 75 categories. The minimalist platform offers a fast way to post any job with basic optimization.

There are no hidden charges for viewing resumes, checking applicant ratings, or reaching out to candidates, and the website doesn’t get involved in any transaction between employers and contractors. You must manually remove your listing from your account once the hiring is over.

Job search on Freelanced can be filtered by industry and keywords.

#4 Guru

Guru is the go-to platform for hiring top-quality and experienced freelancers globally. The website offers a free and unlimited job posting service, although you must pay $29.95 for a listing to appear as “featured” for 30 days. The platform also offers the Enterprise plan with talent filtering, hiring assistance, and contract building services—you can request a demo and receive a quote.

One of the best free features of Guru is finding freelancers based on skill and location. There are about 3,000 high-value freelancer profiles on the platform and more than 800,000 hirers, so finding a match can take a while. Guru also offers 24/7 customer support.

#5 SkipTheDrive

SkipTheDrive helps you reach out to freelancers and remote workers in 24 job categories, including game development, marketing, editing, healthcare, human resources, and product management. The website attracts traffic of 208,000 per month on average. New job listings are also sent via email and shared on social media, so top professionals will immediately be notified about your ad.

Posting a job on the platform costs $99, and the ad is listed for 30 days. There is a refund option if you don’t find a suitable hire. SkipTheDrive also provides additional branding and advertising services.

The platform has no resume searching, indexing, or matching tools. Although SkipTheDrive aims to serve users worldwide, the traffic mostly comes from the U.S.

#6 AngelList Talent

AngelList Talent is a job board focusing on connecting freelancers and remote workers with startups. You can post unlimited jobs for free, but you must subscribe to the Recruit Pro plan ($249/month) if you want access to tools for filtering or contacting candidates.

The website currently attracts 8+ million active and passive jobseekers from all industries, although most hirers are tech startups.

AngelList Talent has mixed reviews from users. While it serves as a one-stop place for startups to find affordable freelancers, the website’s poor customer support and inferior UI design deter many users.

#7 Hubstaff Talent

Hubstaff Talent is one of the best platforms for building a local or global team of individual freelancers and freelance agencies. You can post a job and sort through candidates or agencies for free. Each listing remains active for 60 days. There are paid project management tools but no application tracking or candidate matching features.

The website is available in 212 countries, and it gets monthly traffic of 220,000+ visitors on average, with only about 16% from the U.S. Hubstaff Talent attracts many entry-level freelancers from low-cost-of-living countries, so their hiring rates can be as low as $2/hour!

#8 Remote.co

Remote.co is another popular job board to attract freelancers from all niches, although it’s a bit pricey. Check out the site’s listing plans:

1. $299 per job for 30 days
2. $598 per job for 60 days
3. $897 per job for 90 days
4. An additional $49 to highlight a listing

You can add your company logo to the post, and the website’s editors may also tweak your listing for free to make it look sharper. There is no candidate filtering or similar features included in the plans.

Remote.co has worldwide traffic of roughly 900,000+ per month, with one-third of the users being from the U.S. Jobs on the website can only be filtered by industry.

#9 Jobspresso

Jobspresso is a Canadian job board attracting more than 100,000 freelancers and remote workers from around the world. Listings on the website are cross-posted on Twitter, Google for Jobs, and ZipRecruiter.

You must pay $299 for a 90-day listing, but you can get various discounts if posting more jobs. All recruiters get a 30-day money-back guarantee. Every plan allows full access to Jobsresso’s database with over 5,000 resumes. Like on Remote.co, your job posts will receive complementary editing for optimization.

While Jopspresso’s plans are considered pricey, the website has positive reviews from big companies like Airtable and IVPN on the homepage, so its service is reliable.

What About Job Boards for Niche Freelance Work?

Niche job boards in freelancing are generally limited to three sectors—IT, creative design, and writing and marketing. Check out 13 well-rated job boards attracting high-performing freelancers from these niches:

• Job boards for IT freelancers:
  1. Remotive
  2. Remote OK
  3. DevIT
  4. CrunchBoard
  5. iCrunchData
• Freelance writing and marketing job boards:
  1. ProBlogger
  2. Freelance Writing Gigs
  3. Mediabistro
• Job boards for creative gigs:
  1. Authentic Jobs
  2. Smashing Magazine
  3. Behance
  4. CreativeHeads
  5. Dribbble

How To Avoid Hiring Unfit Freelancers

While hiring freelancers for entry-level jobs is relatively easy, most employers struggle to find the right talent for demanding tasks. The hiring decision gets harder because you’re typically bombarded with quotes or applications, and evaluating all of them properly is next to impossible.

Image source: MarketerHire

The good news is that you can avoid all common pitfalls by implementing the best practices for hiring skilled freelancers, which include:

1. Writing appropriate and detailed job descriptions—Be super specific in the job description to:
   1. Attract suitable candidates only
   2. Avoid future miscommunication about the deliverables and responsibilities
2. Offering a fair rate—Set the fee according to the standard rates in the industry. If your budget is low, consider looking for freelancers in low-cost-of-living countries like Brazil, the Philippines, and India
3. Testing every applicant—Testing freelancers’ cognitive skills is three times more effective in predicting job performance than evaluating their portfolios. Cognitive testing includes assessing a candidate’s industry knowledge, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills

You should conduct a cognitive assessment if hiring for a high-stake project. You can:

1. Prepare a short test and send it to all applicants (the process is usually time-consuming)
2. Go for a third-party applicant testing software

Try Workello—The Complete Hiring Solution

If you’re struggling to find the right freelancers, the problem might not be the job board but your evaluation procedure. Manually filtering out bad applicants is nowhere near productive, so you need a faster, smarter way to pick the best ones.

If you don’t want to bet your resources on untested and unreliable freelancers, try hiring with Workello. It’s a one-stop platform that helps you at every stage of the hiring funnel. Workello offers tailored hiring assistance—you get:

1. Pre-written customizable job descriptions
2. Pre-hire assessment tests developed by experts to suit various roles
3. A centralized dashboard streamlining the entire hiring funnel

Using the platform takes the stress out of the hiring process, shortens your hiring cycle, and cuts down related costs in half!

Here’s how Workello can help you hire the top 1% of freelancers at any price point:

1. View all candidate applications in the same place—your unique Workello dashboard
2. Send pre-hire assessments developed by subject matter experts to promising candidates with a single click
3. Interview the candidates with the best scores
4. Hire a freelancer who is a perfect fit for the job

The best part is—everything’s pre-configured, so you can set up an automated hiring funnel with Workello in 3 minutes and start assessing candidates today!

Start your Workello free trial and discover a faster, easier, data-driven way to hire freelancers!